Spam

[Ed62]

Recently, I've been getting a ton of spam. It got to the point that I don't even want to use e-mail. Has anyone else been bombed heavily, just recently? What's the answer?

Ed

[MikeMcCoy]

I can't remember the last I got on my personal computer (using Thunderbird) but recently we started getting more at work till they tightened up on the filters.

[twistsol]

I seem to be getting a lot more of the crap recently than is normal, and much more of it seems to be getting through the SPAM filters as well. It mostly falls into the categories of dating/sex sites and male performance enhancement.

If you can do without one, you don't need the other.

[mschrank]

Yeah, it's been particularly bad here at work. Our IT guy tightened up the filters, but then legitimate messages weren't getting through. So he loosened it back up and the flood o' SPAM has returned.

I don't let it get to me...just spend a minute or so deleting 'em each morning.

[LinuxRandal]

The commercial email address I have, has gone up some. Nothing like it was for a while (close to 500 spams a day at one point).


My personal ones, I have one account that has been getting more lately, whenever I get a series of jokes from some....
I am sure his computer has been compromised and is a spambot. And he doesn't get it. (thinking of setting him up as a bounce, but he is a customer).

[gsmittle]

Using Apple's Mail on my Macs, I get virtually no spam. At work I get 50-100 penis enhancement spams a day. IT says it's too difficult to filter out the spam without filtering the legit email. I take that to mean that IT (four people for a district with something close to 100,000 Windows computers) is overwhelmed and doesn't have time to set up the filters.

Those folks have an impossible task.

g.

[radhak]

FWIW, my work email is 100% spam free. We use LotusNotes (hate that software, but that's a different rant), but not sure how relevant that it - Been here 2 years, and have not received even 1 email that arrived as a bcc or a mass mailing - and I believe that says a lot! Till i saw this thread, i never wondered about it, but now i want to find out what's the secret here. But most probably they wouldn't tell me - maybe that's how they keep it tight, and for all they know i might be asking just to beat the system .

For personal emails, the email service counts a lot. Gmail is more effective than most. Their filter works most of the time, and you can add your own too.

Yahoo is okay, but Hotmail is the worst (of the lot i have tried) - when i took an id there, i did not use it at all for around a week, and when i did log in i found more than a 100 emails - all spam . Of course, like an idiot i still went ahead and used it for some specific friends, and found out (too late) that they deleted your emails if you did not access it for a month or so! Goodbye Hotmail!

But Ed, to answer your question - the trick is to have 3 email-ids :

(1) for your friends and family circle only. so if you want 'personal' emails, this would be it. Don't give it out to all and sundry, and you would be pretty happy. And tell everybody not to use it for sending out the 'mass joke' emails (because then your email-id goes out to 500 people, most of whom you don't know).

(2) for your commercial dealings - amazon / rockler / etc. This'd be the one you give out when you buy stuff online, or for other similar stuff (your bank, credit card, etc). Here you can expect quite some 'marketing' emails too, as all these companies some time or the other sell your email, and if not, at least market to you themselves. but mostly these'd be targetted, ie, relating to things you already bought, etc. eg - you'd see woodworking related offers. Not too bad, and easily deleted
(3) the last should be a 'throw away' email id. This'd be for the occasions where you have'ta give an email-id out, but you'd not care if you never heard from them at all. eg - the 'get your free magazine subscription here', or 'to browse our website you need to register' type of thing. Obviously you'd not visit here too often, and you would not mind if they fill it up with junk.

I follow this procedure, and rarely fear spam now; at least, it does not control me .

Hope that helps.

[Hellrazor]

Those folks have an impossible task.

Yes they do. Working for a school is very amusing when you have older teachers and computers too.

Our teachers and staff that know me ask me about computer problems, etc since our IT department is dysfunctional too. We have an IT admin who has too many other duties and one tech for a district with 270 employees and 2000 students.

Working for a school district is getting worse lately. I am seriously thinking about moving on or atleast looking elsewhere.

[Uncle Cracker]

Getting quite numerous lately, but both my ISP and my e-mail client software are getting much better at filtering it out. Probably only 10% of what reaches me now is spam, and if it were any less, I would start worrying that valid messages were also getting waylaid...

[Ed62]

But Ed, to answer your question - the trick is to have 3 email-ids :

(1) for your friends and family circle only. so if you want 'personal' emails, this would be it. Don't give it out to all and sundry, and you would be pretty happy. And tell everybody not to use it for sending out the 'mass joke' emails (because then your email-id goes out to 500 people, most of whom you don't know).

(2) for your commercial dealings - amazon / rockler / etc. This'd be the one you give out when you buy stuff online, or for other similar stuff (your bank, credit card, etc). Here you can expect quite some 'marketing' emails too, as all these companies some time or the other sell your email, and if not, at least market to you themselves. but mostly these'd be targetted, ie, relating to things you already bought, etc. eg - you'd see woodworking related offers. Not too bad, and easily deleted
(3) the last should be a 'throw away' email id. This'd be for the occasions where you have'ta give an email-id out, but you'd not care if you never heard from them at all. eg - the 'get your free magazine subscription here', or 'to browse our website you need to register' type of thing. Obviously you'd not visit here too often, and you would not mind if they fill it up with junk.

I follow this procedure, and rarely fear spam now; at least, it does not control me .

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the post. I'll try setting up something like that, and see how it works for me.

I have SBC/Yahoo! DSL. My Yahoo! e-mail has a filter that allows you to target e-mails as spam. When you do this, you should no longer get e-mail from that sender. They tell you the more you use the filter, the better it works. But now it tells me I have reached my limit of 500 blocked addresses.

Ed

[LCHIEN]

you don't know agony with e-mail until you someone does this to you:
steals your e-mail address and sends out spam using it as the return address.

I would get 250 e-mails a day from ISPs that would either reject old unused or discontinued addresses or say that the mail was blocked for being spam or that the mailbox was full. That was just the ones that got blocked... assuming 90% ignored or merely deleted the spams meant that 2500 people a day were receiving mail with my return address. for me that bad part was having to delete all the responses I did get... I soon learned to block mail with undeliverable or blocked subject lines - at the risk of missing notea about messages I did send that were undeliverable. My mail box ( the ISP I had at the time only gave me a 10MB mailbox) was always full.

After about 3 weeks it dies down...

[mpc]

The filter on my ISP is reasonable but I still don't use it; instead I run a shareware app called MailWasher. Basically it ties into my ISP and downloads only the headers to my Inbox. It's easy to define "rules" for filtering:
* rules about "this address is good, allow emails from it."
* this whole domain is good
* this whole domain is bad - just delete any/all emails from it
* If the content or subject line contains keywords I specify, delete it.

It also eyeballs the header itself and tries to classify it as normal, possibly spam, or high probably is spam, etc. I've found it to be darned accurate. It can also run "from" addresses through the Origin database of "known spammers" which eliminates a ton of them. I just let this thing run in the background when I first dial in, after a couple minutes it's done its thing and I eyeball the results, clicking the "delete" box on a few more messages. Then it sends the delete command to my ISP. Only the messages I want actually get downloaded to my PC by my email program this way... less chance of viruses getting into the system, less traffic on my dial-up line, etc.

mpc

[tedkitch]

Here is a suggestion to anyone who is sick of spam and doesn't want to pay for and maintain any "anti-spam" software.

Forward your email to a gmail.com email address. I've been so happy with their spam filter and I have only had 1 email get caught by the spam filter that wasn't spam in over 1 year. I typically get about 1 email a week that is spam that makes it through the filter. You can't be the price.

If anyone is interested, you can start here.

HTH,

[Jeffrey Schronce]

I went from zero spam in my Gmail spam folder to 4-5 per day. Over 50% of those are for penis enlargement. Thom suggests it could be my ex-spouse getting even . . .

[JoeyGee]

I use Yahoo! mail and have been very happy with it. I did notice a few months ago that I was starting to ger spam in my Inbox (maybe 2-3 a week, if that). Right around the same time I noticed more getting through at work, too.